Development Roadmap

The following are short, medium, and longer term planned enhancements to Dataphor. The short term plans are more granular than the long-term plans, though this list should contain overarching goals, not individual tasks.

Note that these goals constitute the current plan and may be changed at any time.

Please do not edit this page and add your most desired feature. Items in this list should graduate from discussion in the forums, or from the project tracking software.

Frontend Architecture

Visual Schema Designer

The platform as a whole has quite a steep learning curve, at least partly due to the fact that a new language must be learned in order to begin using the platform. Although the DDL elements of the language are similar in syntax to tradition SQL, a Visual Schema Designer would go a long way towards reducing the investment required to start using Dataphor.

Schema Maintenance Improvements

The schema reconciliation process, though powerful, requires excessive developer involvement. The process should be made as transparent as possible, and the developer should be guided to provide the correct input in places where transparency is not acheivable.

Application Transactions

Application Transactions should achieve the same level of transparency to the developer as traditional transactions. There is a significant amount of work that needs to be done in order to achieve this transparency.

Performance

Query Engine Optimizations

Because the Dataphor Data Access Engine was designed to distribute query processing as much as possible, the bulk of the optimization effort thus far has centered on query translation, rather than query rewrite. Several query rewrite optimizations can be made that will significantly improve the run-time performance of the engine.

Maintenance

Long Term

The ultimate goal for the platform is to provide a language that is powerful enough to be used for any type of development and yet declarative enough to enable the expression of solutions to high-level problems in canonical form.

ScrewTurn Wiki version 2.0.36. Some of the icons created by FamFamFam.